Cost effective tips to achieve your experiential marketing goals

Experiential projects immerses customers to experience the brand beyond traditional advertising with on-ground customer engagement or face to face connection with the product or service. It is a great strategy to develop customer conversations to trust which ultimately builds on positive brand impact.

The pressure on the market is to make it cost-effective and demonstrate return on investment.

Experiential is not a tactical option but should be a planned necessity. Consumers today are extremely savvy and only respond to brand authenticity. With the rise of social media, experiential marketing can now be a hybrid strategy of connecting with your audience on-ground and online.

The following are benefits that can be achieved through experiential marketing when implemented successfully:

Deeper brand loyalty

Organic social engagement and reach

Increase in sales

User generated/authentic content

Increase product desire

Relationship marketing

Database generation

Corporate Social Responsibility

Here are some suggestions of cost-effective ways to achieve those benefits:

Sampling

Utilise something you already offer. Whether it is a product or a service it is an easy and measurable way to increase product desire. Getting your customer to experience or trial what you offer can enable them to make a decision, feedback or ultimately purchase your offering.

Competitions that showcase skills

People always want to know what others are doing. In addition to that, people like being rewarded when they do something that strokes their ego. This can also apply to experiential. Holding a competition where it requires someone to showcase skills/talent or engage with your product/service will get a mass of attendees watching and engaging. Make sure to use the competition to enable customers to produce content with your brand as they want to show their network what is happening. This type of strategy works best with an engaging hosts to attract attendees and inspire them to take part. Engagement and reach on social media of shared content will be a great way to measure the impact of the activity. It’s important to use a mechanic that captures the data so you can report on ROI of experiential.

Interactive branded content – Pics or it didn’t happen

Almost every savvy consumer, especially millenials, now own smartphones and are on some form of social media. Leveraging your audience and their network is very important to not only spread brand messaging but to achieve experiential objectives we mentioned above. Interlike offers a flexible, innovative and engaging mechanic that captures branded stills, live photos or videos that is easily and instantly shared to the user’s device via eDM and on social media, which is then seen by their friends. Really leveraging FOMO – fear of missing out.

Watch this video to see how Anchor leveraged their Protein Plus – Weet Bix Tryathlon experiential with Interlike

Data Collection during experiential – Start of the relationship marketing

If you do your job right, the customer is at the height of the engagement with the brand during the experiential campaign. While it’s great to capture and share that special moment, it is also the best time to collect customer data. Use seamless mechanic adding customers to a unique email list and start a nurture sequence that is relevant to them.

If using Interlike, you can send personal eDMs instantly and include coupon codes to say thank you for engaging with the brand.

Augmented Reality

In this new era, consumers like to be in control but also be physically challenged. Augmented reality technology is an experiential newcomer that enables users to experience what is usually unrealistic or not physically there through technology. Mixing this with your product or service and getting your consumers to interact will enable them to experience your product first hand. Applying this in your experiential portrays innovativeness which can build on positive brand experience and increase product desire. Check out these examples.

Personalisation

Personalised authentic interaction really fills a deep rooted need for consumers to be appreciated for their uniqueness. Experiential can become very overwhelming for people especially when there are too many things happening. Personalisation can help cut through noise and attract your customer to you. One of the best ways to do this is to introduce something that is solely for them while tying it in with your product or service. One of the best examples that has succeeded in this is Coca Cola’s Share a Coke campaign.

Great local example is from New Zealand Fashion Week where Microsoft were promoting their new product, Surface, one of the best tools for designers to sketch and envision their designs. They encouraged attendees to take their favourite fashion poses, share it on Instagram with the #surfacesketches. Then a brilliant illustrator, Myles Lawford, transformed the photos into unique sketches. We took part and shared our own fashion photo which was chosen to be sketched and now considering purchasing a Surface.

Those are the 5 cost-effective tips that can win your experiential marketing. Now it’s time to turn your experiential into an amazing experience.

Want to achieve your experiential marketing objectives? Book a free 15 min discovery with one of our experts.